Playstation 4 owners have the chance to play a unique, enigmatic first-person shooter this holiday season. Developed by upcoming indie studio, VizionEck, the eponymous game brandished its first gameplay trailer.
It’s harder to understand than Ozzy Osbourne telling a secret in a nightclub on amphetamines, while eating the superglue he was huffing after a car ride from the dentist with Chris Brown, who had mistaken him for a woman, all over a T-Mobile-serviced Nokia, circa 1992, on the peak of Mount Everest.
This seems to be a ubiquitous view about Game Developer Michael Armbrust’s year-long developed brainchild on its twitter feed. Hyperbole aside, the ostensibly complex shooter, on the marginal fringes of the parameters that would correlate with the term ‘shooter,’ takes place in an inversely simple setting. The world is made of cubes and rectangular polygons, painted with black and white, complemented by an RGBY color scheme.
In the gameplay trailer for VizionEck, polyphonic textured, melodically unguided synth is laced over footage of what, personally, I had initially — without context — pegged as a portal-esque platforming puzzler. Upon peering past at the previous tab page containing the press release, it was presented that this piece of interactive poetry was, as previously mentioned, a precisely poised shooter.
As my brows received their quota of daily activity, it prompted the question: Where is the shooting? Although I still cannot, with certainty, say where, expanding rectangles — appearing much like a lock-on system, although probably not — tend to occur with extravagant obtrusive bursts of red. One scene in particular (around 0:47) shows one of these expanding rectangles occurring while the player navigates a marvelous ribbon of green at another cube. No big red splatter, however.
The game’s currently underdeveloped wiki, hosted by the developing studio, goes into superficial detail on the game and some of its mechanics. The trailer shows both individual and split screen gameplay of a four player free-for-all deathmatch — referred to as ‘Ranger VS Ranger.’ According to the game’s wiki, there will be a campaign mode that plays as a first-person puzzle-platformer, so I was pretty close, horseshoes and hand-grenades, and the like.
As it turns out, according to the VizionEck website, all gameplay aspects are in ‘color,’ while the player and basic elements of environment are black and white. The players are black-and-white cubes, rangers, who carry a “charge block” on them which serves as a shield and an attack.
The intriguing shooter was built from the ground up and molds gameplay centric to the art style, according to a press release. VizionEck describes their game as one where the unconventionality extends beyond the art style:
Every situation can be approached in multiple ways, with no inherently bad choices. Destroying enemies and surviving is generally good, but there are exceptions. Even self-destruction(suicide) has positive outcomes depending on the player’s circumstances. This gameplay is incredibly deep and most elements are foreign for traditional FPS gamers.
VizionEck will feature up to 24-player online competition, four-player splitscreen, leaderboards, spectating, capture the flag, free roam, 3D support, and ‘free’ DLC, using in game currency, another deviation from the norm that undoubtedly cues a collective sigh of relief while gamers stuff their frayed debit cards back into their hollow wallets.
For a game built around boxes, VizionEck, forcefully breaks out of all of them. The new trailer is a sure testament to this, and hopefully the game delivers in excitement when its gift-wrapped for release later this year.